The Awful German Language (1880) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#231

Post by scrollaway » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 12:49 PM UTC

willyt wrote: post #228

lolc wrote: post #182

As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available. Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the…

English is not easy: Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s wr…

> Hiccough has the sound of cup

Ok, I had to google that, having never seen it spelled this way. Merriam-Webster agrees that the etymology of hiccup/hickup is imitative of the sound. Wiktionary says "hiccough" is a later spelling, folk-etymology.

Fun, but this one's not to blame on the English language :)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#232

Post by jhanschoo » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 12:49 PM UTC

I chuckled that Twain humorously was complaining about nouns coming after wegen being in the genitive case. After all, it parallels with the 'of' in English analogue, 'on account of'; 'of' in English is used to mark notions that most Indo-European languages that still retain a genitive would express in the genitive. One still frequently encounters the vestige of the English genitive case: it is the -'s or the -s' that one affixes to words to indicate that the word signifies the possessor of some other word.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#233

Post by projektfu » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 1:05 PM UTC

lolc wrote: post #182

As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available. Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the…

Don't know German, but I've learned Spanish. I feel that English is easy because it's relatively hard for a learner to accidentally completely change the meaning of a sentence and make themselves misunderstood or, worse, say something offensive. In Spanish, a single letter changes the subject from him to me, the mood from indicative to subjunctive, etc. The use of pronouns in Spanish is especially difficult for English speakers.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#234

Post by subpixel » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 1:08 PM UTC

I believe Hungarian has something like 16 cases, making German less difficult to learn that in could be.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#235

Post by qwerty456127 » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

lolc wrote: post #182

As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available. Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the…

> It amazes me how many people claim English is easy to learn

People say English is easy to learn because it's both fairly easy and very useful in the modern world. There certainly are languages that are even easier (e.g. Spanish, as soon as I've started learning Spanish I found myself wondering why would somebody need to invent something like Esperanto (which has cases!) when there is Spanish already).

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#236

Post by mh-cx » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 1:16 PM UTC

zvrba wrote: post #229

mh-cx wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a German learning czech and have the opposite problem: the czech (and probably other slavic languages) still have those articles but mostly leave them away. I'm never really sure, when you still need to use them: * ten/ta/to = der/die/das (the) * nějaký/nějaká/nějaké = (irgend-)ein/eine/ein (a, some) In my course there's the example “nějaká paní se ptá na cestu" (A woman asks for the way). Not sure what is differ…

My native language is Croatian, but... > ten/ta/to are you sure it's not "that" (dies(e,es,er)) instead of "the"? > Not sure what is different if the nějaká is left out. I'd interpret it as "The woman asks for the way.", i.e., a particular person is contextually implied. Otherwise it doesn't make sense. EDIT: alternately, it describes an abstract event of woman asking for directions. Putting it as "paní se ptá na ces…

Makes sense - still it feels odd, coming from the “other side“. I wonder when this split happened.

About dieser/diese/dieses, that would be tento/tato/toto (this/that here).

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#237

Post by dyeje » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 1:30 PM UTC

lolc wrote: post #182

As a native speaker I can confirm the observations of Mark Twain. What is ignored in such humorous tirades is that every human speaker will push information density to the very limit of understandability. In every language. They will use all the tools available. Sure, the German case system is getting weaker as the centuries go by. And in some situations you will wonder why it's used still. But that doesn't mean the…

Why don't you think removing genders will make the language easier? I studied German in college and memorizing these was my only complaint.

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#238

Post by fauigerzigerk » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

woodpanel wrote: post #225

modernerd wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the “agency of societies” that helped English lose its gendered nouns. One theory is that Old English society found them useless because there was overlap between endings, causing noun ending inflection to “collapse” into a single neutral form, which started in the North of England and progressed to the South.[1] Societal changes are already influencing gendered nouns in Germany[2]. Some dialects of German (Nied…

> "I've spoken with Austrian natives [...] who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. " I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely. As a native speaker you will barely notice it, unless foreigners remind you of it. > "To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burd…

>I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely.

Agreed. I find it hard to imagine how something can possibly sound old fashioned when there is no more modern alternative.

My German may not be perfect, but I have never heard anyone fudge definite articles in a way that makes them indistinguishable from each other (or drop them altogether).

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#239

Post by Koshkin » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 1:40 PM UTC

robaato wrote: post #212

this_user wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that I have noticed about English is that it seems to be more concise. There are things that can be expressed much more elegantly and with fewer word in English, while saying the same thing in German may require a mid-sized sentence.

Having been involved in writing internationalised software, you can get into trouble if you don't leave enough space for your labels, button captions, messages etc to be translated into another language which may requires 10-50% more space. An example: https://medium.com/dropbox-design/design-for-internationaliz... From what I can see guidance is that Finnish and German are typically quite a bit longer than English..…

This is partly a consequence of these languages using the alphabet that was designed to serve a different language. (Another striking example is Vietnamese.)

Re: The Awful German Language (1880)

#240

Post by InternetOfStuff » Sat, Oct 06, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #191

InternetOfStuff wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Khmer is sure to have its own oddities. I learned Thai, which shares Khmer's refreshing simplicity, like not having tenses. However, it has "classifiers", which are used when counting things. In English, you might say "Three children", in Thai you would say "Children three persons", where "person" happens to be the correct classifier for children. Makes sense in that case, but in general it's weird (and somewhat come…

Yeah, it's weird, Thai and Khmer are very similar, and share some words, but also very different. Khmer isn't tonal, and has really simplified grammar. They used to share an alphabet, too, but the Thai opted to simplify it (westernise it) while the Khmer opted to keep their original alphabet. Written Khmer is hard for us westerners to deal with because of this. They have lots of vowels and consonants that we don't ha…

I don't know enough (or in fact any) Khmer to make a meaningful comparison, but the "b", "bp", and "p" consonants exist in the Thai alphabet as well.